Audio Tracks

Tracks with the speaker icon have sample clips. Click the title to listen.

Description

Thomas Merton"All the Living and the Dead": The Literature of James Joyce - CD set

4 Talks on 3 CD's

Join Thomas Merton in exploring the literature and spiritual background of the greatest novelist of the twentieth century: James Joyce.

Born in 1882 to a Catholic family in Dublin, James Joyce wrote some of the most acclaimed masterpieces of modern literature: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, and Finnegans Wake. Educated by Jesuits and deeply influenced by Thomas Aquinas, Joyce wove Catholicism into his works.

Now, you have the rare opportunity to join Thomas Merton, one of the greatest modern spiritual writers, in four amazing lectures on Joyce’s literature. Delivered in 1968, they are now available to the public for the first time ever. This one-of-a-kind set includes an introduction by Dr. Michael Higgins, a renowned Merton biographer and scholar of literature and religion.

Before becoming a Trappist monk, Thomas Merton studied English at Columbia and taught literature at St. Bonaventure University. Merton understood the essential relationship between literature and theology; indeed, God has chosen to reveal Himself to us through literature.

In these lectures, Merton focuses on Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners. You will look at the timeless story, “The Dead,” and how it embodies Joyce’s concept of aesthetics and the epiphany. Then, as you listen to Merton read the classic “Araby,” the voice of James Joyce will truly come alive.This course is ideal both as introduction to James Joyce and as an exciting work of scholarship by one great author on another.